Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Presumed Guilty

Now that Rep Peter King seems to think Glenn Greenwald should be arrested for being a reporter, here's a question for him:

Does he want James Rosen arrested and prosectued under the Espionage Act for helping a State Dept employee leak about North Korea? Just a wild guess--he doesn't. Actually the story says he doesn't.

He may or may not care about the AP reporters who published leaks about the Yemeni spy in 2012, a story that emerged on the fateful Friday May 10th after a year in mothballs, got some life, then disappeared again behind a wall of fresh scandals. But back when that broke he wasn't calling for any reporters to be arrested, just the leakers.

Criminy, people need to chill. The Snowden story is so weird that Tom Clancy might call it silly and cliche. A pole dancer girlfriend? Really? Shouldn't we suspect a Russian honey trap or something? We need to understand exactly what in the devil is going on before rational judgments can be made. Is the administration doing something illegal? That would make Snowden more a whistleblower. King's reaction by itself is at least some proof that he felt he couldn't trust revealing information to a congressional committee or federal IG.

Or, is Snowden indeed a traitor who fled to a communist protectorate to leak about vital US secrets in order to get back at America in some kind of weird-ass Ron Paul revenge scheme? Let's wait and see before declaring someone guilty and committing them to a rhetorical guillotine without trial. After all, rights are part of what this whole mess is supposed to be about. King and others should never take them lightly.